The first time I tried to explain what my company actually does, I fumbled it badly. I was a college student at the University of Missouri, double-majoring in marketing and computer science, and I was pitching Skypig to a small room of people who had been kind enough to listen. I used too much jargon. I leaned on words like "pedagogy" and "engagement" because I thought they sounded smart. The audience was politely lost.
Afterward, I rewrote the whole pitch around a single phrase: experiential learning. It's the foundation of everything I've built since.
What Experiential Learning Actually Means
Experiential learning is the idea — formally articulated by educational theorist David Kolb in the 1980s — that knowledge is created through the transformation of experience. In plainer terms, you don't really learn something until you've done it, made sense of what happened, and then applied that understanding to a new situation. It's a cycle: experience, reflection, conceptualization, experimentation, repeat.
This isn't a fringe educational philosophy. It's the model that medical residencies, military training, and apprenticeship programs have used for centuries. It's also the framework that organizations like the Association for Experiential Education have spent decades championing. And it describes how almost every founder I've ever met actually learned to run a company — not through books, but through making decisions under pressure and watching what happened.
The reason experiential learning works is biological. The brain encodes memory more effectively when there's emotion, motor activity, or social interaction tied to the moment. A lecture hits one or two of those triggers at most. A real-world experience hits all of them. It's the same logic behind why gamified learning is so effective — games create the emotional and social conditions that make information actually stick.
But experiential learning isn't just hands-on activity for its own sake. The reflection step is what separates it from busywork. Without taking time to think about what just happened, students don't actually transfer the lesson to other contexts. They just remember the activity.
How I've Seen It Play Out
I've watched experiential learning in action in some of the most unlikely places. I've helped teachers in with educators I've coached run entrepreneurship sessions where students invented products on the spot. I've sat with corporate teams who hadn't laughed together in months and watched them build genuine ideas after twenty minutes of structured play. The settings could not be more different. The pattern is the same: when people do something instead of being told about it, they remember it.
When I designed Products: The Card Game, the entire structure was a deliberate attempt to compress an experiential learning loop into a single round of play. Players invent a product, defend it to the table, and then immediately face the consequences of their pitch — laughs, votes, blank stares. They reflect on what worked. They try a different approach next round. They get better, fast.
I've watched students who came into a classroom certain they were "not creative" walk out an hour later with a notebook full of ideas. I've watched high schoolers who couldn't speak in front of three peers find their voice after two rounds of pitching ridiculous inventions. None of that comes from being lectured at. It comes from being invited to do something and then being asked, gently, what they noticed. If you want a deeper read on the philosophy underneath all this, my piece on learning by doing covers the same ground from a different angle.
If you're an educator, parent, or curriculum designer trying to figure out where to start with experiential learning, my advice is to resist the temptation to make it complicated. The structure matters less than the doing. Pick a real problem. Give students a way to act on it. Build in time to talk about what happened. Repeat. For concrete starting points, my go-to entrepreneurship class activities are designed around exactly this principle.
That's the entire model.
About the Author
Aaron Heienickle is the founder of Skypig and the creator of Products: The Card Game, a hands-on entrepreneurship game played in classrooms, family game nights, and corporate offsites across the country.
He started Skypig his senior year of high school and has been building it ever since. Aaron studied Marketing and Computer Science at the University of Missouri and is a regular at Missouri Startup Weekend, one of the largest pitch competitions in the state.
Through Skypig, Aaron has worked with educators, students, and corporate teams to bring entrepreneurship to life through doing — not just discussing. Learn more about Aaron.